In article 91-05-103 mabel!landers@uunet.uu.net writes:>I'm interested in finding references about the design of instruction sets for>software based virtual machines. ...

You may want to have a look at a very high level abstract machine called
Ten15. A number of languages can be compiled onto it, and it runs on a few
different real machines, if I remember correctly. Maybe someone else can
expand on this; it's been a while since I read the article: